[Shotwell] merging several photo directories into one

[Adam Dingle]

On 09/17/2011 05:51 PM, Christophe Drevet wrote:
> 2011/9/17 oliver<oliver at first.in-berlin.de>:
>> You want to have a picture directory, which has subdirectories
>> for year and month and you want to put files from different
>> directories with different subdirectory-structure into the one and new
>> directory with that new structure scheme?
>>
>> Do I understand correctly?
> That's exactly what I meant.
>> You could use Perl or some other programming language to achieve this.
>> Which OS do you use?
> I'm using Debian GNU/Linux. Yes, maybe I'll have to do that.
>> Or you could just import the files into shotwell.
> Yes, it would do the trick but… my photos are already in shotwell. And
> there are dozens of tags, events.
>
> As I think about it now, I guess I could just tell shotwell to save
> all metadata within the photos, start a blank shotwell session and
> import all photos. Maybe this will work... I'll try that.

That won't work, since Shotwell can't currently store all metadata 
within photos.  It *can* store tags there, but can't store photo edits 
or event information, for example.  So if you start a blank Shotwell 
session and reimport all your photos, you'll lose any edits that you've 
made to your photos from within Shotwell.

It would be great if Shotwell could reorganize all your photos into a 
directory structure of your choice automatically.  It can't do that yet, 
but we'd like to get there eventually:

http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/2170

In the meantime, about the best you can do (as suggested elsewhere in 
this thread) is to use an external tool to rearrange the photos, then 
reimport the photos (either manually or via auto-import) into your 
*existing* Shotwell library.  Then Shotwell should recognize the photos' 
new locations and all the metadata should tag along (so to speak).  As 
someone else suggested, it's not a bad idea to back up your database 
before you try this.

adam